While the roads to Congress are often full of potholes, in 2018 many of those roads looked like mine fields. With partisan control of both chambers of Congress up for grabs in the first midterm of the Trump presidency and the theme of potential impeachment looming on both sides, The Roads to Congress 2018 offers inside views of this critical election through expert analysis and case studies of the year’s most high-profile races. Thematic chapters examine the intraparty battles occurring within both the Democratic and Republican parties, the use of social media as part of House and Senate campaigns (including Twitter use by and about President Trump), and the potential impact of an increasingly diverse Congressional candidate pool on the structure and functions of the national legislative branch. Additionally, key case studies written by local experts offer fresh analysis and original insights on a sampling of major campaigns spread across the country, featuring in-depth analyses of contentious U.S. House and Senate campaigns across the nation. This book illuminates the key themes and trends coming out of the 2018 midterm elections to help readers cast off the uncertainty that surrounds our politics, and to understand the dynamics of elections which may either herald the triumph or signal the demise of Trumpism.

This book analyzes changes to campaigning and voting in the United States in 2020. The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 upended traditional campaign strategies, posed unprecedented challenges to candidates, and possessed the potential to fundamentally alter how campaigns think about running for office. At the same time, the Trump administration’s divisive handling of twin crises stemming from the pandemic and rising racial tensions loomed over congressional races as the most disruptive election cycle in living memory. The ramifications of the 2020 congressional elections for the direction of public policy in America—and perhaps for American democracy itself—cannot be overstated. The Roads to Congress 2020 examines key House and Senate campaigns, candidates, and controversies in the 2020 election to reveal what accounts for the outcomes and point the way to America’s political future.

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery. These fights didn’t happen in a vacuum. Freeman’s dramatic accounts of brawls and thrashings tell a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful emotions they elicited, raised tensions between North and South and led toward war. In the process, she brings the antebellum Congress to life, revealing its rough realities—the feel, sense, and sound of it—as well as its nation-shaping import. Funny, tragic, and rivetingly told, The Field of Blood offers a front-row view of congressional mayhem and sheds new light on the careers of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and other luminaries, as well as introducing a host of lesser-known but no less fascinating men. The result is a fresh understanding of the workings of American democracy and the bonds of Union on the eve of their greatest peril.

This book analyzes both local and national House and Senate campaigns in the 2022 midterm elections to reveal how distinctive campaign dynamics have a collective national impact. Despite serious efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race that went mostly unopposed by Republicans, the GOP is poised to gain seats, and perhaps control of Congress less than two years later. Their efforts to accomplish this feat may be explained by the biannual pattern of surging and declining partisan electorates that political scientists have long used to explain election outcomes. But in an era where global pandemic lingers, inflation hit its highest rate in two generations, Wall Street faces its first bear market in more than a decade, war among developed nations has returned to the international stage, and efforts by a former President to maintain his grip on a party that lost the 2020 popular vote by 9 million proved largely successful, the story is clearly more complicated. The 2022 midterms thus arrive on the heels of unprecedented developments for democracy in America. The Roads to Congress 2022 provides an essential guide to understanding these developments, with thematic chapters authored by more than thirty experts in campaigns and elections that explore the evolving state of party politics, electoral governance, redistricting, participation and representation, and profile the key races of the season.

Diamond looks at conservative politics in the United States from World War II to the post-Reagan years.

A compendium of the most ridiculous examples of Congress's pork-barrel spending.

Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world’s Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book is the first to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. Hasia Diner tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.

How southern members of Congress remade the United States in their own image after the Civil War No question has loomed larger in the American experience than the role of the South. Southern Nation examines how southern members of Congress shaped national public policy and American institutions from Reconstruction to the New Deal—and along the way remade the region and the nation in their own image. The central paradox of southern politics was how such a highly diverse region could be transformed into a coherent and unified bloc—a veritable nation within a nation that exercised extraordinary influence in politics. This book shows how this unlikely transformation occurred in Congress, the institutional site where the South's representatives forged a new relationship with the rest of the nation. Drawing on an innovative theory of southern lawmaking, in-depth analyses of key historical sources, and congressional data, Southern Nation traces how southern legislators confronted the dilemma of needing federal investment while opposing interference with the South's racial hierarchy, a problem they navigated with mixed results before choosing to prioritize white supremacy above all else. Southern Nation reveals how southern members of Congress gradually won for themselves an unparalleled role in policymaking, and left all southerners—whites and blacks—disadvantaged to this day. At first, the successful defense of the South's capacity to govern race relations left southern political leaders locally empowered but marginalized nationally. With changing rules in Congress, however, southern representatives soon became strategically positioned to profoundly influence national affairs.

A transportation expert makes a provocative case for changing the nation’s approach to highways, offering “bold, innovative thinking on infrastructure” (Rick Geddes, Cornell University). Americans spend hours every day sitting in traffic. And the roads they idle on are often rough and potholed, with exits, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges in terrible disrepair. According to transportation expert Robert Poole, this congestion and deterioration are outcomes of the way America manages its highways. Our twentieth-century model overly politicizes highway investment decisions, short-changing maintenance and often investing in projects whose costs exceed their benefits. In Rethinking America’s Highways, Poole examines how our current model of state-owned highways came about and why it is failing to satisfy its customers. He argues for a new model that treats highways themselves as public utilities—like electricity, telephones, and water supply. If highways were provided commercially, Poole argues, people would pay for highways based on how much they used, and the companies would issue revenue bonds to invest in facilities people were willing to pay for. Arguing for highway investments to be motivated by economic rather than political factors, this book makes a carefully-reasoned and well-documented case for a new approach to highways.